


If I Stay All Afternoon

by solarfemm



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Food as a Metaphor for Love, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Stalking as a form of codependency, do not copy to another site, don’t stalk your lovers, references to hydra torture and brainwashing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:15:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25912708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solarfemm/pseuds/solarfemm
Summary: Bucky starts breaking into Steve's house when he's not home. Steve doesn't mind nearly as much as he should.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 28
Kudos: 123





	If I Stay All Afternoon

**Author's Note:**

> This fic generously brought to you by my 9pm breakdown to Alanis Morissette’s “Your House” and while this doesn’t follow the exact plot of the song, I owe her my life
> 
> I don’t know anything about brownstones or skylights or Central Park or boba tea so beyond here lies no accuracy

The days pass in quick succession, leaves falling and turning to mush under busy feet, jumping foxes and lazy dogs. One day, Barnes is pointing a gun at a man’s head as he begs for his life, saying, “I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know, they never told us who you were,” until Barnes pulls the trigger and the man stops lying. The next day, he’s bundled on a train in two coats to stave off the Chicago winter chill that cuts through him, biting, whenever he steps outside. 

He has eight million dollars stashed in various places around the country, four million in various places beyond it, and two hundred thousand in 100 dollar bills lining the inside of his inside coat. Technically, he’s homeless, a vagrant, a nomad. He wanders the streets, picking food from bins to sate whatever hunger is left in him after 70 years of starvation and liquid diets because being seen by anyone is too much for him right now, let alone being handed a menu and asked what he wants. What the fuck does he want? He kicks leaf piles and trips over sidewalk cracks in his haste to be anywhere, anywhere at all. 

He sees him. The man. Steve. His best guy. He remembers the ocean of his eyes and the sand of his hair. He tails him walking to the bakery and he tails him walking to Stark Industries and he sees what the man doesn’t see, which is that there are eyes everywhere. These eyes do nothing more than watch, and neither does Barnes. 

One day in a succession of days, unbeknownst to Steve, Barnes walks him back to his brownstone, nine steps behind like a consummate professional, his hair hanging down his shoulders in two long plaits. No one suspects the hipster with a dozen piercings, a Bengal tiger tattoo up his neck and a Yankees tee of being an international criminal. When Steve turns to look around, Barnes stops to tie his shoe, criss cross down, loop around, and ten seconds later Steve is at his door, pushing the key in, turning the lock. Barnes breathes a sigh. Relief? Maybe. Relish? The click sounds out as Barnes passes by the door and a shiver runs down the xylophone of his spine.

The next day he has an idea. He waits outside Steve’s brownstone for him to leave. A fresh box of ugly fruit and vegetables arrive on Steve’s doorstep, ready to be plucked out of obscurity. Steve does, taking no care to look around for the eyes that may be watching and the ones that actually are. Barnes plans to hang out, chill, laze for the rest of the day on the steps of a neighbouring apartment block, but when a cherry-red Camaro pulls up in the street, Steve jogs out of his door, down to the street, and into the front seat. He carries a bag that looks too bouncy-castle-in-a-living-room to be able to fit, but it does. Then they’re gone in a puff of sound and fury signifying nothing. 

So, Barnes has nothing to do. He could go back to the shelter where he sleeps and resolutely ignore the people around him, but he doesn’t. He sees an opportunity to take, to grasp in his fingers a fledgling bird struggling to fly, and he takes it. 

It’s too easy to break into Steve’s house. No alarms, one lock on the door that Barnes picks with the safety pin dangling from his earring. He supposes that being 6-foot-2 and 220 pounds is enough of a deterrent, but when he gets inside, it’s apparent why Steve doesn’t bother. 

There’s nothing in here. The kitchen houses one bowl, one plate, one set of cutlery, one frying pan, one spatula, one mostly-blunt knife, no spices. The rest of the vegetables are in the fridge, but Steve had left a collection of potatoes on the countertop. Barnes hangs his head before he continues. The living room is bare, the hallways bare, the spare bedroom bare. The walls are an off-white that haven’t been painted in years and are starting to crack at the corners. At least the main bedroom has a bed, and when Barnes looks under one of the pillows, a laptop with no password but both Netflix and Hulu accounts. His porn is in a folder labelled “Porn”. Hopeless.

There’s nothing on the laptop to make anyone suspect that Steve is still involved in overseas missions or political affairs. His days of meeting and greeting the New York elite are behind him, and he takes a more placid approach to his current lot in life. His house bears the proof of his loneliness, his isolation, and Barnes has been tailing him long enough to know his only friends are Falcon and Widow. 

It takes a minute for Barnes to realise that he’s sitting on Steve’s bed. He’s perched on the edge, in eternal discomfort, but the bed is nice. Firm but plush, a dark mauve bedspread and four pillows, sheets tucked in tight enough to bounce a quarter off of. Barnes sitting there has rumpled the sheets the tiniest amount. He can smell Steve in here, his aftershave, his clean, earthy scent beneath that, the vestiges of sweat left on his pillows. 

Barnes puts the laptop down and takes hold of the nearest pillow. He brings it up to his face and inhales the sweet scent of Steve’s hair, smelling as good as it did in 1928 and 1934 and 1945. On the fire escape in a heatwave. Tucked into bed with another cold that’s _not serious, Buck, stop fussing_. Out on the frontlines, the only thing that Bucky had to remind him of home. His brain starts whirring a mile a second and he tosses the pillow back down, backing out of the room as though something is going to jump from under the bed, from behind the door, clamp its metal hands around his arm, push plastic between his teeth, drill into his mind until he doesn’t know who he is anymore. 

His heart rate doesn’t slow down until he’s ten blocks away, breathing heavily through his nose to stop the impending panic attack.

* * *

The more he remembers, the worse the nightmares get, shocks of memory and phantom pain that keep him struggling to breathe until he wakes with a shout. He stays awake for days trying to stave them off, but the prickles remain in his periphery, shooting pain through his nervous system, through his very blood. Hydra hasn’t left him yet.

He swings by Steve’s apartment everyday with a terrible dread hiding beneath his ribcage, tucked away like a wife in the attic, ready to burst forth and burn his entire body down. Steve returns nine days later, and by then the lettuce has wilted and the potatoes are growing ears. The next day another box of ugly fruit and vegetables arrives, so in the end it doesn’t matter.

* * *

He hasn’t stolen into Steve’s apartment since Steve has been back, but he’s aching to do it again. It’s risky, with Steve only leaving for errands and jogs, but the need thrums under Barnes’s skin like a foot pedal on a timpani. He doesn’t, though. He has more self-restraint than that. He’s the fucking Winter Soldier. 

But then he breaks, because of course he does; he always will where Steve is concerned. Break his concentration, break his collected calm, break his facade, break his conditioning. Oh, does he ever break.

One day, while Barnes lounges on some steps across the street, drinking from a Coke bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag, Steve steps outside his apartment, looks up, and waves to him. A cold vice clenches around his heart before he gets ahold of himself. He waves back and shivers in the wind that trails through the street, kicking up enough dust to make him sneeze. 

Steve smiles at him from across the street, a puzzled bemusement on his face—and Barnes smiles back—before he takes off for his morning run. There’s no way he would have recognised Barnes as the Bucky he knew, or the one he doesn’t. He waits until Steve’s around the corner before he goes the other way, quick steps to the beat of the timpani, scaling up the side of the building. 

He expects it to be a challenge, but it’s as easy as anything to break into Steve’s skylight, as easy as picking the lock on the front door. When he slips into Steve’s bedroom, any part of him that is on high alert out on the streets calms. Here is Steve’s home, the place Steve sleeps and eats and bathes and lives. Nothing and no one hurts him here. Barnes is safe, too.

His fingertips trail over the walls as he makes his way into Steve’s en suite. Water drips from the showerhead, a slow _plonk, plonk, plonk, plonk_ that echoes around the bathroom. His toiletries are lined up in neurotic order: deodorant (cheap), aftershave (expensive), beard oil (hipster), toothpaste (whitening). One toothbrush in a small, blue plastic cup, taken from a pack of five that sits in the top drawer. The aftershave and beard oil were presents from Falcon. Barnes had watched from the rooftop across the street as Steve opened them, heard his _shit, Sam, thanks_ , the hug that followed, the _you gotta take care of yourself, Steve, man_ , and then three hours of watching _Stranger Things_ , which passed mostly in silence. 

He touches the things on Steve’s bathroom sink, the way Steve might have touched them, handling them with a sturdy grip. He rolls each bottle in his flesh hand before he puts it down. There’s an electricity in the air, Barnes knowing that Steve was here just hours or maybe minutes ago, brushing his teeth, spritzing on cologne, as though the routine of human actions could make him into the person he pretends to be. Barnes has sat across the street on the roof of a neighbouring building watching him stare into his hands for an hour before Widow had rung the doorbell. The way his face had shifted from stony to exuberant from the living room to the doorway. The face he puts on for the delivery drivers who want his picture. The women he’s invited there, only for them to leave as soon as they’re finished. Barnes has seen the picture he paints of himself, and the canvas underneath. 

Barnes turns to the shower. He reaches out to twist the handle closed before his hand has a better idea. It twists the handle until water gushes out, splashing into the tub, a pounding of water on porcelain that drowns out any other sound. Barnes runs his metal hand under the water, cold, before he turns it hotter. He strips out of his clothes leisurely, as though he has all the time in the world, before he steps under the spray. 

As he dollops soap from the bottle in Steve’s shower caddy, as he runs his hands across his body, as the spray envelops him in heat and noise, as he thinks of Steve doing the same thing, it occurs to him that he hasn’t had a real shower this century. The showers at the shelters he sleeps at when he’s not stalking Steve can hardly be considered self-care, and before that, he barely had a concept of his own identity, let alone that he needed to do more than the bare essentials—eat, shit, drink water, stay off the street on rainy days and out of the sun in the heat. If he achieved all of those things, it was a good day. 

But this, showering in Steve’s bathroom, in a claw-foot tub with a modern shower system—he can enjoy this. He counts the minutes he’s in there, three, four, five, before he makes himself turn off the water, drip dry, get dressed, and escape out the window. He doesn’t stick around to see Steve return home.

* * *

He feels like a criminal, which he supposes he is—breaking into Steve’s apartment just to touch his things, and then, later in the evening, watching him through his window. Tailing him, watching from across the street as he tells Falcon, “I swear it’s him, I know it. Who else would break into my apartment to take a shower?” Steve’s voice hums over the bug that Barnes had planted in his phone, resting in his pocket but close enough to pick up their conversation.

“I think you need a better security system,” Falcon says, taking a sip from his boba tea. “Or _a_ security system.”

“What, cameras? Motion detector? If I do that, he won’t come back.” He puts his head in his hands. “I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could text him. Just to make sure he’s okay.”

“I think he’s fine. He’s probably doing a lot better than you think he is.” Falcon’s voice is thoughtful and a little hopeful. No one could replace Bucky as Steve’s number one carer, but Falcon seems to be picking up the slack without any complaints. Sometimes it’s too much to take care of him, and Barnes can’t be everything he needs when he needs it.

* * *

Barnes doesn’t take a shower again, but one day he brings a gift. Does Steve like gifts? his brain asks, as he pays for the rubber plant. He seems to like and use the gifts that other people bring him, and his house is so sterile it needs something living to fill it up. The clerk at the nursery is very kind in helping him choose something hard to kill, and when Barnes goes to Steve’s house he leaves it on the coffee table in the living room. 

He doesn’t come back for several weeks, but when he does, the pot plant is sitting in the sun on the window sill, looking healthy and alive.

* * *

He could give himself up at any time. He knows this. He’s seen his own dog tags around Steve’s neck when he changes his shirt. He’s heard the way Steve describes the ghost of Bucky as though it’s still haunting him, like it won’t give him up. Bucky is dead—the Bucky Steve knew at least—and Barnes isn’t giving Steve up any time soon. 

One morning, he finds a note nestled in the leaves of the rubber plant, folded sketchbook paper with only six words written on it.

_Meet me at midnight? Central park._

Barnes picks a pencil from a mug on the coffee table.

_Sure_

He leaves the note on the coffee table and escapes out the window as the front door opens, quick as lightning, soft on his feet.

* * *

Steve sits on a bench under a lone streetlamp, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His flaxen hair shines in the lamplight and Barnes imagines burying his face in it, pressing his nose in there to inhale the sweet scent of Steve’s head, like he would a baby. He watched Steve arrive at 11:52 and waits until 12:09 before he walks out of the treeline. He stops behind the bench and drops to the ground, leaning his back against it. 

“Hey, Steve. Don’t turn around.” He’s wearing his Army surplus parka and combat boots, hair tucked up under a cap in order to look like the threat he is. If Steve sees him, Barnes doesn’t want him to see the friendly sports fan with hoop earrings and androgynous mystique, but the evil at the heart of the world, the thing Steve should fear and not want with every fibre of his being.

Steve tenses. The air turns electric, a static hum between them that sends frissons through Barnes’s body. “Hey, Buck. I thought maybe you wouldn’t show.”

“Why would you think that?” It’s almost too hot with his parka on, but whether that’s the temperature or the heat from Steve’s body through the metal bars, he doesn’t know.

“You always disappear right before I get home. Don’t think I can’t tell you’ve just been there.”

Barnes chuckles, surprising himself with the sound. “I have to keep the mystery between us alive somehow.”

“Or, you could stay.” The nakedness of Steve’s voice, the unadulterated need in it, shocks Barnes. Steve’s not like this with Falcon or Widow. Right now he’s the _too much_ of himself that made Bucky fall in love with him the first time and kept Barnes in love with him all these years. “You could stay with me.”

Barnes shifts. “What boba tea did you order today?”

Steve waits a beat before answering. “Strawberry green iced tea with passionfruit jelly.”

“Sugar?”

“Hundred.”

“Always had a sweet tooth.”

Steve settles back onto the bench. “You’re one to talk. Every last cent we had in the late 30s went to Cumberland Valley.”

Barnes stretches his legs out in front of him, getting comfortable. He doesn’t need to run just yet. “You loved those candy buttons. That’s why I bought so many of them.”

“Liar. You ate all of them before I even got home.” The dulcet rumble of Steve’s voice echoes into the night, wrapping Barnes up in its layers. 

“You want candy? I’ll buy you candy. I’ll buy you so much candy you’ll burst.”

Steve laughs, a delicious, punchy sound. It’s easy to remember how it used to be between them, back when there was a “them”. Steve bent over an easel while Bucky napped on the ratty sofa they lifted off their neighbour Mrs. Ellis when she moved back to Virginia in ‘38. Both of them on the fire escape with their legs dangling as the sun set on another immeasurably hot day. The sweat between their bodies as they fucked the night away, firm touches, teasing tongues. Steve reading aloud, tales from Ovid and Homer, myths of people that history remembers, lovers who killed themselves because they couldn’t live without the other. And always the laughter they shared.

“Do you have any money?” Steve doesn’t say it accusingly, but tenderly, as though asking a child if they need breakfast.

“I’m fine, Steve.” 

“Are you sleeping well? Where do you—” He stops, seeming to realise that the question won’t get him anywhere. “Are you eating?”

Barnes doesn’t know how to answer. “Yeah.” Is he eating? Once every day or two. Mostly he sleeps when he’s too exhausted to stand. The night is quiet, and they’re the only people in Central Park. They are their own world. The silence stretches between them like a rubber band, taut, ready to snap when Steve speaks again.

“I missed you.”

Barnes sighs. “Steve—”

“Shut up and let me talk, Buck.”

Barnes shuts up, mentally calculating his quickest exit. Should he just up and run? Should he knock Steve out so he stops running his big mouth? How can he get out of this situation with the rest of his sanity and his heart intact?

“I know you’re not the guy I used to know. I know that. I know you’ve done things, and I’ve done things, and we’re not the same people we were back in the ‘40s. The guy I remember you being—that’s not you anymore. And the guy you remember me being isn’t me, either. But that doesn’t change the way I feel about you.” Steve’s voice is steady, honest. His heartbeat stabilises at a steady _whump-whump, whump-whump_ on which Bucky can measure his own as it rises, as blood pounds in his ears, as his heart tears itself into strips. “Just because we’re different people doesn’t mean the way we fit together has gotta be different. I know you remember how we were, and I gotta say that it hasn’t been like that with anyone else, not since I’ve been out of the ice and not before. It can still be you and me against the world.”

Barnes holds his breath throughout all of this. “You really feel that way?” he asks when Steve’s done. 

“Yeah. One hundred per cent.”

Barnes wants to say something, anything to quell the beating of his wretched heart. The metal of the park bench feels like a wall between them, the two of them gazing through a crack in it. A thread of memory twirls itself around Barnes’s mind. “Love made you bold, then, hey Stevie?”

Steve makes a sound like a sob that he swallows as soon as it’s out. “Yeah, Buck.”

Barnes’s heart is still beating too fast and tears start to prickle his eyes. 

“Will you come home with me?” Steve asks, his voice thin and light with hope.

Barnes groans. He hasn’t showered in days, his hair is disgustingly greasy, and he can’t remember the last time he ate. If he’s the one that has to take care of Steve, he doesn’t want Steve trying to take care of him. “Now’s not a great time.”

“Oh, am I keeping you from something?” Steve teases. It makes Barnes laugh. “Mr Popular with all his plans. Nothin’s changed.”

Barnes stands and puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder to stop him from turning around. “I’ll see you around, Steve.” And then he disappears back into the trees.

* * *

After the park, Barnes scales back on the stalking, but the longer he goes without seeing or hearing Steve, the more he wants to.

One morning, Steve takes his chopper out, which means he’ll be gone for most of the day. Barnes takes the opportunity to steal into his bedroom again. The place is still immaculate, but now it’s filled with the things that Barnes has brought him—a pile of books on his bedside table, two plants in a corner of the room each, freshly burned incense sticks, a Joni Mitchell CD he bought for 25 cents. 

He touches these things, too, fresh with the memory of Steve touching them. He can almost feel Steve’s fingers, each surface a pond, and the ripples of him spreading out to the shores. He walks into the bathroom where the garish light is still on and a fresh towel sits on the bathroom sink. He touches the things in there, too.

Barnes picks up the beard oil and spills a droplet on the inside of his flesh wrist. He watches it slide down his arm and run towards his elbow, echoing the river of his blood that thrums through his body, the calling for—something, someone. Steve. His head hurts from being awake for 54 hours, and the puff of scent clouds his senses like mustard gas. 

He drops the bottle and it smashes on the floor at his feet. He stumbles back into the bedroom until his knees hit the bed and he goes down. His body starts to spasm and he curls in on himself, turning until his face is mashed into the sheets. It feels good to lie there, on the soft, mauve sheets, surrounded by the accumulation of Steve’s stuff, the smell of Steve thick in his nose. Falling asleep like that is like slipping into a river fully clothed; he struggles to stay awake, but the current washes him away.

* * *

It could be hours later that he wakes up. The front door opens, closes, two sets of footsteps sound and Steve’s voice drifts up the staircase. Barnes is groggy, too groggy to move properly, then Steve is taking the stairs two at a time and bursting into his own bedroom while Barnes pushes himself up.

Their eyes meet across the room, and a strangled cry works its way out of Steve’s open mouth. His eyes are narrowed, disbelieving, a look of anguish on his face, the depths of which Barnes has no way of parsing. It’s as wide as a chasm, but as forgiving as snow swallowing footprints. 

“Hi, Steve,” Barnes says, yawning through it. He glances down at the loaf of ciabatta nestled in Steve’s ham-hock arm. “Is it lunch time already?”

* * *

Steve heats up a pot of ready-mix gravy while Barnes waits patiently. He doesn’t seem to want to take his eyes off of Barnes, but he also can’t look at him properly, going slightly cross-eyed, glancing down and then up again. 

“You’re here,” he says, finally. 

“Yes.” Barnes is smiling at him. Now that he’s started, he can’t stop.

Falcon is watching this pathetic attempt at conversation from the doorway of the kitchen, arms crossed, gaze alert. “Steve.”

Steve makes an anguished noise and turns back to the gravy pot. He stabs angrily at it with his spatula while Falcon eyes Barnes warily. Barnes smiles at him too, but he isn’t swayed.

Falcon looks from the gravy pot to his plate with a third of a loaf of ciabatta on it and says, “I’m not eating that. You’ve served some sorry food but this has gotta be—” He makes a swooping noise and Bucky stifles a giggle into his fist. 

“Fine,” Steve says and pulls the bread from Falcon’s plate onto his own.

Falcon of 2016 looks different to Falcon of two years before. He’s wearier, warier, more wise to the world and its horrors. Barnes has tailed him a few times, watched his punishing workouts, his meetings with Widow, the few men and women he’s invited back to his apartment over the last year. His life is full, and he laughs. He’s who Steve could be, with more therapy and less—Bucky baggage.

After a minute, the gravy starts to burn, and Steve takes it off the stove, pouring it over the bread on both of their plates. If this is what passes for food in Steve Rogers’s life, Barnes might be better picking from the trash can. Still, it’s a meal. Steve made him a meal. He starts to pull the bread apart and shovel it into his mouth, unheeding of the heat of the gravy. He’s survived worse than burning his mouth. 

It’s only when he starts to eat that Steve softens. He watches Barnes rip the bread, swipe it through the gravy, and pop it into his mouth, and Barnes watches back. When Steve smiles, it makes the corners of Barnes’s eyes prickle in his own kind of anguish.

“Okay,” Falcon says, “well, uh. I won’t interrupt this… Whatever.”

“Thanks, Sam,” Steve says, but he only glances away from Barnes for a second before he’s back. 

“I’ll let myself out.” Sam wanders off, muttering, “Fuckin’ weirdos deserve each other,” as he closes the front door behind him. 

And then it’s just Barnes and Rogers, together again. Steve’s face melts like a bowl of snow on a summer sidewalk, all creased up with his lower lip wobbling. 

“Don’t fucking cry on me, Steve,” Barnes says. He pushes his empty plate away. Steve hasn’t touched his. “If you cry, then I’ll cry, and we’ll just be two old farts wailing in your bougie brownstone.”

“‘M not gonna _cry_ , Buck,” he says, but his body contradicts him when a few fresh, fat tears spill over the rims of his lower eyelids. He keeps looking at Barnes, unashamed, his face still scrunched up even as the tears slide down and catch in his beard.

Barnes reaches out with his flesh fingers to wipe one of the tears away, but there are more coming as Steve catches his hand and presses it to his eyes. His shoulders shake and soon Barnes’s hand is wet, tears sliding between the gaps in his fingers. He stands and leans over to catch Steve’s head in his other hand, bringing it forward to press his lips into Steve’s hair. He smells of sunlight and clean living. 1928 and 1934 and 1945 and 2016. Wherever that scent is, Barnes is home. 

Steve lifts his head and pushes his face against Barnes’s, their beards scraping in an unbearably erotic way. The kiss happens naturally, a careless thing in the midst of their tearful reunion, a gunshot in the darkness. Steve kisses Barnes’s chin and then his cheek and then his mouth, and Barnes kisses back. Steve’s face is wet—snotty, too—but it doesn’t matter. Their first kiss in 71 years doesn’t have to be perfect; they want each other too badly for it to be. 

“Thank you,” Steve says, gasping the word in between presses of their lips, in between sucking on Barnes’s tongue and pushing his own into Barnes’s mouth. “You came back to me.”

He doesn’t have the time to say, “I was always going to, I’ll always come back to you,” so he kisses it into Steve’s mouth.


End file.
